FileSonic disables all filesharing
filesonic.com
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My "friend" used to use megaupload, filesonic, and other services to watch all his tv content every night, and even paying for a megaupload account (never putting any money back to the creators of content). It was really convenient and the price was right. Now without it, even in the last few days, the pain point has shifted enough that he started buying the seasons of shows he is interested in on itunes. (giving a cut to the creators)
There was a point even a year ago that he could get the latest film on piratebay so easily that there was no point going to the theatre. Now it seems a little harder to find the releases, or at least more inconvenient, so my friend has gone to the movies a lot more.
Now I personally get the whole internet freedom side of things, but at the same time I have seen my friend screw the content creators out of their cut because some middle man made it a lot more convenient to get the content.
I get the idea that some people have used these services for personal content, but if the business model of a service is _primarily_ around the sharing of copyrighted content then something should be done. And especially if the service pays the uploader based on how popular the stolen content they upload is.
At least in my friends case, he spent $100 on itunes in the last day, _only_ because megaupload was not there, and there was enough pain to look for another source.
If there are millions of people out there like my friend, that is a lot more revenue for the creators/studios.
And no, I'm not a troll from the film industry. This is just a real observation.
> And especially if the service pays the uploader
> based on how popular the stolen content they
> upload is.
Your observation is correct, but I'd interpret it differently: The answer should not be to ban MegaUpload. The answer must be to provide legal services that are at least as convenient as MegaUpload.
There's a huge market of people who pirate content not because they're unwilling to pay for it, but simply because it's either impossible or extremely inconvenient to get legally.
Personally, I value my money too much to spent $100 to "rent" tv shows. My pain point is being able to own the things I buy. Until then, it's bittorrent until the bluray comes out, then buying that.
[edit: you can also - although this is fairly recent - redownload an unlimited number of times to registered computers, devices or Apple TVs]
Canadians should be so lucky. You still cannot get most content in most of the world. No Netflix, no Hulu, no Pandora. iTunes has a meagre selection, and that which is eventually released here, comes half-a-year late and overpriced.
I'm Australian, but this experience is shared by most people who live in not-the-US. The content industry still has a world of distribution failings to address before their customer-hostile anti-piracy flailing becomes justified.
Improving the distribution system is not a source of explosive growth, rather, it is I disagree with your assertion that the content industry is requisite for mere survival industry. There's no potential for explosive growth because piracy is an income problem, not an internet problem. Cracking down on file-sharing sites will not solve the problem because the illegal activity merely shifts elsewhere. Improving distribution systems will not solve the problem because free is still cheaper than not-free.
I disagree. Yes, there are many people who pirate because they can't or don't want to pay. But I believe there's an equally large group of "casual pirates" who only do it for content that they can't (easily) get otherwise at all.
This latter group may be relatively small in the US because you have a whole range of online content providers (NetFlix et al). But it is definitely huge in europe and other countries where said services are not available or only in crippled form.
A few select services (Netflix, Steam, uhh that's it?) are more convenient than piracy. Piracy rate on a $1 iTunes games is often 50 to 90 percent. It doesn't get any cheaper or easier than that.
You see - that thing is happening all over again with TV Shows and Movies. As far as I know, there's no legal way for me to watch latest episodes of shows that I like. There just isn't. I would be happy to pay $5 or maybe even $10/month and be able to stream HD episodes to my PS3, without having to deal with eztv.it, RSS feeds, rtorrent and all this crap. I really would. But I can't. I simply can't.
Now, for movies it's another thing - I think I can buy/rent movies from iTunes, but they're just too expensive, compared to what movie ticket or DVD costs - Apple (or any digital-media store that I know of, for that matter) doesn't adjust their prices to different markets (hell, they even show prices in Euros, which we don't use!) - and unless something magical happens to our economy, I doubt it'll ever take off over here.
When there's no kindle-compatible version of an ebook I want (which sadly happens more often than not) then I grab the torrent.
It may be ignorant and "illegal", but I consider it voting with my wallet.
I can't say I feel bad about it because I happily do buy the content when and if they let me. My first stop for media is always iTunes, amazon and various local eBook sites, and I'm glad every time I don't have to resort to searching a torrent.
I'm sure I'm not the only one with that "shopping strategy".
You could also try really hard and find better things to do with your time. It's just a movie, not dialysis. You won't die if you don't see it RIGHT NOW.
One thing that makes this hard in reality is that ANY service where people have to pay means people have to SHOP. Which means they have to make decisions about what entertainment products to buy, and at what price. And since these are "experience goods" you can't judge them until you've paid for them. In my book, that means means this particular type of "shopping" REALLY sucks.
So the fact that "shopping-just-sucks" (and especially for experience goods) is the TRUE friction that any hypothetical as-easy-as-Megaupload services need to overcome. A big draw of Megaupload (I say this never having heard of it before this week) is you can consume whatever you want and there's no downside to a bad choice.
So I'm not sure how any alternative service avoids the Shopping For Entertainment Products Sucks Syndrome unless they get some reasonably-priced all-you-can-eat plan that makes a lot (80%?) of commercial content available under one roof.
Once they do get to the point where it makes sense to license the movie again, Apple might pay extra for an exclusive so they won't license it to Netflix too, or vice versa. You can expect streaming libraries to suck in certain ways, like time between movie release and streaming rights, for a long long time -- until consumption patterns change on a large scale -- because that's what maximizes profit.
"my friend" would be happy to have BBC content on subscription, but all "he" is left to do is use easynews.com subscription for downloading. He would be happy to pay that to the content owner instead. But the content owner doesn't want that.
megaupload owners - fast cars, hookers and blow
studios - fast cars, hookers and blow
actors - fast cars, hookers and blow
apple - wages for workers in china.
I guess the lesser evil is the studios...at least they are employing local hookers!
Via morningstar.com, in 2010 Apple had 65,225,000,000 in revenue.
Total operating expenses for 2010 were $7,299,000,000, just 11.2% of revenue.
Executive compensation was $148,424,291. That is 2/10ths of 1% of revenue. That is just for the the top five execs and Jobs only took $1 in compensation. Still I don't think it is accurate to say that a 'significant' cut of revenue goes to 'the executives'.
When Megaupload disappeared that entity became iTunes. The moral of the story is, if there is one, that the legal services are getting close, but they haven't quite made it yet. There is room for improvement, but reason for hope.
The lesson learned here is simple. Your friend will pay for the most convenient way to get his movies. The answer for movie studios is to use their resources to create the most convenient way not kill those more convenient than theirs.
Something should have been done: Hollywood should have bought Megaupload. It was a working model, they just needed to own it.
Dropbox is brilliant for teams working together though.
but for corporate file sharing, i would recommend renting a VPS and organizing some simple SSH-based copying with FileZilla, for example. Or some HTTP-based sharing if you want.
Tell that to the pirate bay.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANTDkfkoBaI
:)
but Sharereactor was designed for exchanging movies illegally, whereas rapidshare tries to be different :)
This makes it very ineffectual for the type of wide-spread piracy other file hosting services are subject to.
Man, I wish I could remember the name of that program.
Hell, if this file-sharing take-down shit keeps up, we'll end up on USENET again. Better yet, TOR will finally go mainstream.
I am very serious, it is well designed for that, especially if you are sending to several people.
I do realize there are still other cyberlockers up, but it seems highly possible they are all going down soon, disabling service to the US, or will be severely feature limited.
From the site:
What is Sendoid?
Sendoid is an on-demand peer to peer transfer system. It makes transferring any size file between two people as simple as clicking a link!
Where do my files go?
Directly to the recipient. The peer link provided after selecting a file connects the recipient directly to your machine. Files never touch or pass through our servers.
They say it's also AES encrypted. I've never used it personally, just heard of it before and I remembered it now.
On the other hand, scp could work. There are various visual scp/sftp clients for Windows.
First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I was Protestant.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
They should be scared. What they're doing is illegal in 168 countries. They're not complying with the letter or the spirit of laws like the DMCA that would limit their liability.
I don't think your quote really applies in this case. Megaupload is being prosecuted for plain old copyright infringement, under the Copyright Act of 1976, nothing new. If you want it to be legal for a site's owners to upload DVD rips and pay other users to share them, then that's the law you need to attack.
We can debate the merits of file sharing and, IMHO, there are real arguments on both sides, but I'll make the claim that there clearly ought to be a line drawn at people charging money/basing business models on the access to copyrighted files that they don't own the copyright to.
To argue against that, you have to go after the larger notions of copyright and IP laws as a whole, just as dangrossman said.
edit: I'm not sure why this is being voted down – but I'd ask for you to respond rather than just voting down comments you disagree with – discussion seems much more valuable than moderation.
Insane laws like SOPA and worse are the only possible answer if you want to enforce copyright. Nothing less than full blown constant network surveillance would work.
Supporting copyright as it's defined by law and not supporting laws like SOPA is an oxymoron.
I'm thinking it's at least partially an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" attitude. Megaupload was about to launch a music distribution service for indie musicians, MegaBox, that, due to Mega's popularity among non-technical users, would have been a significant threat to the major labels, iTunes, and Amazon MP3. They were also fighting Universal to defend their Mega Song. Copyright is out of control, the public domain is stagnant, so maybe some people think that anyone fighting the copyright establishment is worth supporting.
Another part may be that some people here survived their teenage years on downloaded music and developed their skills using pirated software, and would never have become programmers/designers/hackers without it. Maybe they feel like the excessive force shown to combat piracy is like an indirect way of the government and major copyright owners saying, "Your career is illegitimate." It's an attack on their identity.
Which is pathetic. They need a better identity, because they one they've got is hollow.
P.S. A number of your comments on this thread have been inflammatory. You've been here long enough to know there are better ways of getting your point across.
I just checked and I've sent 15 DMCA requests to Filesonic and had them all removed within 24 hours.
To be protected by the safe harbor laws in most nations you need to not have actual knowledge of infringement. If files in someone's account are being flagged on a regular basis, you have a hard time arguing you don't know what they're doing anymore. The indictment against Megaupload says that there's physical evidence of exactly this occurring -- the site owners know that much of their traffic is from users uploading pirated content, even looking into their file lists, yet they reward these users instead of blocking them.
> Under the knowledge standard, a service provider is eligible for the limitation on liability only if it does not have actual knowledge of the infringement, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, or upon gaining such knowledge or awareness, responds expeditiously to take the material down or block access to it.
http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
And as the Megaupload indictment showed, these sites are not taking efforts to stay unaware of what their users are doing -- they're looking into their accounts, seeing that the top shared files are DVD rips and commercial software, then rewarding these users instead of removing the content. That's illegal.
1) Identify potentially infringing files of sufficient value to constitute criminal copyright infringement
2) Identify accounts that uploaded those files
3) Verify that the account holder is a US citizen (jurisdiction)
4) Track down where that user distributed the links in order to collect evidence proving:
a) The infringement was willful
b) The infringement was of commercial advantage or private financial gain
5) Obtain a court order for each account to subpoena the identity of the account associated with the ISP of the uploader's IP address
6) Track down the current copyright holder of each potentially infringing work, and verify that the person identified was not licensed to reproduce or distribute the work (i.e. don't sue the label marketing agent for uploading a demo copy of their artist's song)
Now, you can prepare and file one case.
2. dont see a problem with this one.
3. lets skip this one; a UK student is almost on its way for breaking US law and be deported to US, so juristiction doesnt matter anymore -- especially if you can narrow your search down to people who hold hundreds of files.
4. I think once you prove the file was downloaded from a different IP than your (owner) then its enough of an evidence. you uploaded from California, bunch of guys downloaded in Europe. Unless you can prove you went to Europe and lived in all the cities download took place from, you are cooked. a/b) your infringement does not have to be willfull AND you dont need to make money off of it to be charged with owning illegally obtained files.
5. dont see problem here either. the justice system has all the time and money to persecute.
6. with a 5 or 6 biggest hollywood studios it shouldnt be a problem, should it?
At this point it's clear that you haven't actually read the copyright law of your country. Merely having illegally obtained files is never criminal in the US. Not under USC Title 17 (our copyright act) or the amendments (NET Act of 1997) that weakened the requirements of the financial gain clause. Without these elements, "owning illegally obtained files" is a civil matter only. A federal prosecutor has nothing to charge you with.
Why waste peoples' time debating law when you don't know what the law is?
There are HUGE problems with copyright and IP law, and those also need to be fixed. The damage caused through the corrupting of those laws has been far worse than copyright infringement.
I mentioned in another thread that this is the most sensible way to handle this, because there's no way of knowing whether some of the links to identical/deduplicated files were legitimate. My previous comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3489054
So while it would be sensible to only remove the one link that you were notified of, if there are others, then by not taking them all down the service provider does not gain the safe harbor protection of the DMCA and remains liable for copyright infringement. Right now, as a non-lawyer reading the DMCA, it looks to me like any storage service that dedupes files is required to remove the file (from everyone's account) when any link to that file is reported, even if the other accounts have permission to store that file.
I feel like this should probably be a grey area to be sorted out in court, if not a reasonable codification into law.
But as I understand it the wording of the DMCA can be interpreted to mean that you must remove all links to the file, regardless of whether or not some of those users had the legal right to distribute while others didn't.
It seems a little banal to compare all this to, you know, genocide.
... since when is this a crime? There are tons of "clones" of YouTube out there.
Probably almost every video on Youtube is owned by the video creator. When you upload a video to Youtube, you still own the video and you're granting Youtube a revocable license to use it (see section 6 of the Youtube EULA, https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms). In addition, Youtube enters commercial licensing agreements for much free and paid content.
Youtube videos aren't public domain just because they're on the Internet! No, you can't copy and host data you don't have the license to. And recall that these videos belong to little guys as well as big ones.
> Really?
There hasn't been a trial yet. I doubt you have any inside information on the activities of megaupload. In the US, justice demands a presumption innocence in criminal cases.
I was distrustful of Megaupload and its ilk long before the government made these arrests and filed charges, but I will wait until they've actually won their case in a court of law before I'm going to accept those charges as fact. I hope more people will do the same.
These guys have some serious legal firepower. I sincerely hope they are able to defeat the extradition request.
Yeah, not having access to free entertaiment == holocaust.
Get over yourself. People need to do some introspection and figure out how they became so pathetically dependent on being entertained.
Dropbox exclusively monetizes the uploader of the file, not the downloader.
Megaupload, filesonic etc. actually pay the uploaders who upload attractive pirated content that attracts downloaders who can then be monetized aggressively for faster or no-wait downloads.
Very contrasting business models.
You don't have to explicitly condone privacy in order to be guilty of privacy.
I don't go to theaters. I think it's a stupid waste of time for a bad quality experience. I watch tons of movies on pay-per-view, but the list I can choose from is 5-10 movies long. Netflix here is also limited to a few titles. I record a lot of series, but some of them are incomplete or translated.
There is no other option to me. I need to be a pirate if I want that content. I tried way too many times to get MPAA to accept my money, but they don't want it.
Good thing is that I've been discovering some really cool stuff made in Europe (specially France) (and they accept my money for their content!!!).
EDIT:
I also need to make Itunes believe I'm in the US in order to buy the stuff I want. I can't use my credit card, so I buy gift cards using some "illegal" websites. This is pathetic.
Or you could find better to do with your time rather than wasting it watching TV shows and movies and trying to figure out how to get them.
On the other hand the hydra effect will come as it always will be. And there are countries in this world the FBI cant go after the people ( Russia / Mainland China etc. ). Data will just move from one to another datacenter if servers get confiscated.
And everyone could see how much money can be made out of this sector. If the content industry does not abandon their old business model they can witch hunt forever.
TBP is a prime example for this they have thrown a lot at this problem and the site is still operating.
Filesonic joins the Internet Watch Foundation to combat online criminal content. They join over 100 companies from across the world in the fight against online child sexual abuse content."
Omg, this IS how they are going to push through the piracy laws!!
Yes, they'll make anyone fighting those laws look like a pervert. Erase all traces of credibility from their opponents, and to make the political cost of fighting this enormous.
Like somebody else said: welcome to the mayor leagues.
use FileSonic for downloading copyrighted material, I was wondering myself how long it would be before FileSonic either shutdown or disabled sharing entirely.
I'm sure there are other "scene release" sites, but this is one in particular that I've been aware of for a long time.
Say I upload 50 divx films, and give out that accounts details, so people can freely take what they want, or even add files?
It's also much less convenient than just sharing the link.
Plus some troll would just delete all the shared files.
Or is dropbox doing something fundamentally different with their sharing feature that avoids a megaupload scenario?
Megaupload, filesonic etc. actually pay the uploaders who upload high-demand pirated content that attracts downloaders who can then be monetized.
Very contrasting business models.
If you can still send files with a password, then this still be an alternative for 'sending large files to clients.'
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I subscribed to filesonic when sharing of links were allowed. I am no longer interested to have this account if there is no sharing of links allowed. The functionality of the service that I signed up for has signifcantly reduced. Thus I would like a refund of my subscription fees. Since my membership was for Lifetime $149. I would like a full refund of this amount please.
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When central storage sites are shutdown other mechanisms will be used for sharing. But why bother as long as it works? You're not locked into a particular site, so there's no reason to use other approaches just because something might happen.